Brazil’s state-controlled oil company Petrobras announced on Wednesday morning that it was selling all of its Peruvian subsidiary, Petrobras Energia Peru, to the China National Petroleum Company for $2.6 billion.
The move is aimed at shoring up Petrobras’s balance sheet. The company’s production has been stagnant for years, despite huge offshore discoveries in 2007. The government has also hurt Petrobras’s cash flow by forcing it to sell gas and diesel domestically at below global market prices.
The company’s debt is already nearly 35 percent of its equity, the level at which ratings agencies may downgrade the firm. So its ability to raise funds on the capital markets is limited.
The company announced last year that it would raise $9.9 billion through asset sales. This year, it has already sold small exploration blocks in the Gulf of Mexico and sold assets in Africa to Brazilian investment bank BTG Pactual for $1.49 billion.
Luana Helsinger, petroleum analyst with the Brazil branch of the Mexican brokerage Grupo Bursátil Mexicano, said Wednesday’s sale was a success for Petrobras.
“To meet their fund-raising goal, they had to make a big asset sale,†she said. “This will give them some breathing room to focus on investments in Brazil.â€
Ms. Helsinger said the company’s finances would remain under pressure until the government permitted it to raise domestic fuel prices â€" a move she said she expected to come when the board of directors, headed by Brazil’s finance minister Guido Mantega, meets Nov. 22.
JPMorgan, in a research note on Wednesday, also called the deal a “positive for the company†but said that “we view asset sales as a way to cover for the lack of cash generation†caused by the “misalignment†in domestic fuel prices.
For the Chinese oil company, JPMorgan wrote, “The transaction increases its bias to South America, a target region for overseas investment.â€
The sale comes as Petrobras is attempting to carry out one of the most aggressive corporate investment plans in the world. The company intends to invest $237 billion from 2013 to 2017 as it aims to more than double petroleum production to 4.2 million barrels a day by 2020.
Ms. Helsinger said the company’s near-term investments are mostly on schedule, production is finally showing signs of growth and its 2020 production target appears realistic.
For China, the purchase is another step in what appears to be a long-term plan to acquire energy resources in Latin America. The China National Petroleum Company, together with another state-controlled company, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, each bought a 10 percent share of exploration and production rights to a giant Brazilian offshore petroleum field named Libra in October.
For that deal, the two Chinese companies each had to pay $700 million upfront and will each have to pay 10 percent of the development costs for the field, estimated at $200 billion to $300 billion over the next 35 years.
